New U.S. Attorney Rick Hartunian tied to Central New York by loss in Flight 103 bombing

Stephen D. Cannerelli / The Post-StandardRick Hartunian was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. His primary office will be in Albany.

Joanne and Joe Hartunian had just gotten the call confirming their 21-year-old daughter Lynne was among the 270 people killed in the 1988 explosion of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The news paralyzed them. Joanne collapsed onto the couch of their Niskayuna home and stayed there for days. Her 27-year-old son Rick, then a new lawyer doing mostly real estate closings, brought her food because she could not get up.

“I kind of had to kick into gear,” he said. That included not only helping his family through their grief, but eventually becoming a leader of a group of relatives of the Pan Am victims.

And that experience, as a crime victim and advocate for others, helped him realize he wanted to be a federal prosecutor, Joanne Hartunian said.

Rick Hartunian, 49, reached a pinnacle Thursday in his 20 years as a prosecutor. The U.S. Senate confirmed him as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York — a 32-county area that includes Syracuse. The job pays $153,200 a year.

Courtesy of State University College at OswegoLynne Hartunian (left) and her Oswego classmate Colleen Brunner were killed in the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. This photo was among those found in Hartunian’s luggage in the wreckage of the plane in Scotland. He’s from the Albany area and will have his primary office there. But Pan Am 103 will forever link him to Central New York. Thirty-five Syracuse University students were aboard the plane, along with Lynne Hartunian and her Oswego classmate Colleen Brunner, and a couple from Clay.
Lynne Hartunian was a communications major at SUNY Oswego, on her way home from a study-abroad program in Europe, when the plane was blown up by a terrorist bomb.

Rick had talked with Lynne over the phone periodically during her trip.

“She was eating it all up,” he said. “She was living life to the fullest, which is how I’ll always remember her.”

The murder changed his destiny. He’d already been hoping to be an assistant district attorney in Albany County before that. But his Pan Am 103 experience opened his eyes to the power of the federal government, and the need for compassion for victims of crime, he said.

He spoke with his mother about the impact only once, she said.

“The only thing he ever said, and this was a long time ago, was that after being a victim he had decided that he wanted to be a prosecutor,” she said.

Rick said he didn’t want Lynne’s death to overshadow his life.

“You don’t want to be defined by those events alone,” he said in an interview last month. “They were an important chapter in my life that steered me, that had impact on me, that taught me a lot about myself, about faith, about family and the importance of living life to its fullest every day.”

As he choked back tears, he said his sister’s legacy should be, “We triumphed over this evil because she would’ve wanted us to.”

Rick was one of the seven original members of the Pan Am 103 victims group that lobbied for a presidential commission on airport security and pushed for further investigations from the U.S. and British governments.

“My family and I realized we could kind of curl up in a ball and be paralyzed by the tragedy that had befallen us, or we could get up and do something about it,” Rick said.

He was the legal adviser to the group, even though he’d only graduated from Albany Law School three years earlier.

“His role was critical,” said Bert Ammerman, of New Jersey, president of the group. “And that was a critical period in those first two or three years, dealing with the federal government, dealing with our internal family group’s organization, and trying to work our way through a maze of challenges.”

The challenges included getting death certificates for the victims from Scotland, getting victims’ property returned to their relatives, and identifying remains. In his sister’s case, Hartunian used his legal contacts to employ the help of an Albany forensic pathologist, who then reached out to another in Scotland. Hartunian had police obtain his sister’s fingerprints from their home in NIskayuna, and he got her dental records to help identify her body.

When Lynne’s property was released by investigators, Rick asked that they send it to him and not his parents. He and his parents and his older sister Patty went through them together.

“The Scots had cleaned and ironed each piece and wrapped them in paper so I wouldn’t have to see anything that might’ve gotten on them,” Joanne said. Scottish authorities also developed 20 rolls of Lynne’s film they’d found in her luggage. Her mother has 16 of the pictures on display.

“They say a lot about her,” Joanne said. “She took a lot of pictures of old people. She loved old people.”

And she adored her older brother Rick, Joanne said. When they were growing up, he was a rarity among her friends — the one older brother who was willing to drive them all to the movies when he was a teen-ager, Joanne said.

Rick and the family visited Georgetown University in the early 1980s, before he’d been accepted there. His mother tells this story: When they drove off the beltway, they yelled, “There’s the Capitol!” Lynne, who was about 13, said, “And my brother’s going to work there some day!”

“We talk about that quite often,” Joanne said. “How’d your sister know you were going to be involved in the federal government?’”

Rick Hartunian worked for seven years as an assistant district attorney in Albany, handling mostly drug cases, before becoming a federal prosecutor in 1997. He prosecuted drug and street gang cases.

He only spoke of Pan Am 103 when there was news of the prosecution of the accused Libyan bombers, said former colleague Paul Clyne.

“We’d talk about the status of the investigation — how’s the proof?” Clyne said. “The kind of thing that prosecutors would talk about.”

They had one of those conversations, after the Scottish government freed the one man convicted in the bombing — Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. Some people, including victims’ families in Great Britain, contend that Megrahi was innocent. Hartunian strongly believes otherwise.

He’d met with the Scottish investigators and FBI agents in Lockerbie, and knows how they searched every inch of an 845-square-mile area to look for clues, he said. That’s how they found the key piece of evidence linking the Libyans: a portion of a detonator as big as a fingernail, Hartunian said.

For Megrahi’s claim of innocence to be true, all those investigators would’ve had to have been part of a huge conspiracy.

“And I could never accept that,” Hartunian said.

When Rick called his mother last year with the news that Sen. Charles Schumer had nominated him as U.S. attorney, she thought of how proud her late husband would have been. Joe Hartunian owned a grocery store in Latham for 33 years before he died in 2004.

At Rick’s wedding, Joe was the best man.

For Hartunian to go from the son of a grocer and stay-at-home mom to U.S. attorney speaks volumes about the work ethic his father instilled, Joanne said. Their son worked at the store even while he was a lawyer.

“His father would’ve been beaming” about his new appointment, Joanne said. “He and Lynne are beaming some place, and they’re watching over him.”